Mumble: "Server connection failed: The remote host closed the connection" Possible Cause

I did an extremely newb thing the other day that caused me a night of bewilderment and frustration.

Often times, some of my Friday Night Gamer buddies of mine will play ShootMania during our lunch break at work.  We sometimes communicate on Mumble, an excellent VOIP server made for gamers.

The problem this particular day is, none of the rest of my crew jumped in the server, so I basically ended up only wearing my headset to hear the game sounds.  Those of us in our server happened to all be in the same room on the same LAN, so it didn't matter.

That said, I completely forgot I had connected to Mumble before, so when we stopped our gaming session, I accidentally left Mumble connected.

Fast forward a couple of days, to Friday Night Gaming and it's time for me to get my game on with my buddies.  I connect to my Mumble server from home (with the same account I use at work...)  It connects for about 30 seconds, then kicks me back off, with the error message:

"Server connection failed: The remote host closed the connection"

30 seconds later, it reconnects (Mumble was set to auto-reconnect should it get disconnected.)

After much frustration and realizing that the rest of my crew was having no problem, I gave up and we all moved to our back-up server.  After we finished our gaming session, I was bugged and wanted to discover why this had happened to me.

Like a sunrise, it dawned on me...

"I'm still connected at work... and Mumble there is also configured to reconnect."

I quickly logged on to the VPN and connected to my work machine, saw myself logged in there and disconnected.

I connected from home again and was happily staying connected.

Moral of the story: If you connect to Mumble using multiple computers or devices (they have iOS, Mac OS X and Linux clients too) and you ever encounter this error; make sure you are not connected from another device still; especially with "auto-reconnect" enabled.

I'm sure there are other reasons this error will come up, and I can't help you there.  But if this scenario is a possibility for you, make sure you explore it and correct it as necessary!

Steam Client and/or Game Update Not Working

Sometimes when Steam downloads an automatic update to a game, the game doesn't work quite right after.

There are many workarounds/solutions to try, but I need to share this particular one I learned, because it may apply to many different Steam games.

In my particular case it was Dungeon Defenders.  Steam downloaded the Eternia Shards Aquanos update, and when I tried to launch the new Aquanos map from the Tavern in a Private game connected to the Trendy network, it would kick me back out to the server list to choose someone else's game to join.

Many people suffered the same fate as discussed on the Steam Forums (where I thankfully found the solution through a combination of posts in the thread there; thanks to all, especially IceArrow and Sylesta at the end of page 3 and 4.)

The steps are as follows (discussed in reference to Dungeon Defenders, since that was my problem; and on Windows since that's what I'm running):

1. Make sure Steam is closed.
2. Locate your ClientRegistry.blob file in the Steam installation directory and either rename it to ClientRegistryOld.blob or move it to your recycle bin (in case you need to restore it.)
3. Launch Steam (which will recreate the ClientRegistry.blob file)
4. Right-click the game's name in your Steam Library and go to Properties
5. Click on the "Local Files" tab in the game's properties
6. Click "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" button
7. Once the verify finishes, close Steam down entirely.
8. Relaunch Steam
9. Launch your game and test the issue again.

Steps are in detail below.  I hope it helps you!

1. Make sure Steam is closed.

Right-click the Steam icon | Click Exit

2. Locate ClientRegistry.blob and rename it.

Right-click ClientRegistry.blob | Rename to ClientRegistryOld.blob

3. Launch Steam.

Click the Steam icon in your taskbar

4. Bring up the game's properties.

Right-click the game name in your library | Click Properties

5. Click the "Local Files" tab

Click the "LOCAL FILES" tab

6. Click "Verify Integrity of Game Cache"

Click the "VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME CACHE" button

7. Close Steam

8. Relaunch Steam

9. Launch your game

Click Play | Good Luck.  Have Fun!